Performance and how configurable things are, plus ease of use.

For instance, my default router/modem device from my ISP was super clunky and confusing. I needed to set up some custom port forwarding and firewall rules. The aftermarket router I bought was faster, had way better wireless coverage, and the UI was so much easier to set up the configs I needed.

So it’s up to you, from what you said, seems like you probably would be good with the default from your ISP.

Sure thing…now GPL/Creative Commons all your code involved in any way for your models, documentation, parameters, data sets, and allow full unlimited integration and modification by any parties to any portion of it.

“Sintendo” lol!!!

I’m gunna start using that haha.

Here’s my twisted life exposed…I have no issue watching 1080p on my QLED 4K TV. I game at 1080p happily, I honestly don’t give a shit about 4K content.

1080p looks good enough for me, and I actually watch 720p on my phone screen half the time too.

And not because of lack of speed, I have a 1Gbps+ fiber line up and down.

And tbh, if it means I get to own and control my media, I would tolerate even worse quality if that’s what I needed to do.

Grunge computing ftw! Quality at the cost of your soul? Fuck that!

True, sadly. Honestly it’s already there in certain specific respects.

This is kind of like asking, “what is water worth?”

To an upper middle class person in the developed world, a dollar or two. To a person stranded in a desert, they might literally kill for it.

If you are just a Joe shmoe out in the world living a basic life, privacy might not be worth hardly anything. But if you’re a whistle blower or a political dissident in an authoritarian country, your privacy is worth everything.

First off, good on you for being careful. Ultimately, use the same methods that you would use when vetting other sources, like academic or personnel for hiring.

Check reputation via stars, active contributors, see what accounts are contributing and what other projects they also contribute to. Check their LinkedIn profile and personal websites.

See if you can confirm the project is being used safely by reputable groups. See if people, especially public people you trust are using/recommending it without being sponsored.

Check in private forums with other devs and users, see what people are saying. Check the code yourself, etc.

Ultimately, there’s no way to know 100%, even large companies and organizations have been duped in the past by backdoors or security bugs in OSS they use. You can be very confident however, it’s all about how much investigation you are interested in doing.

And of course, don’t ever put all your eggs in one basket.

And if after lots of investigation, you still have a bad feeling in your gut, listen to that. Better to be a little too careful than to compromise yourself by ignoring that gut feeling that something just doesn’t pass the smell test.

Obligatory reminder:

Email is not a secure medium! If you need truly secure and/or anonymous communications, DON’T USE EMAIL!

Use a platform/protocol designed from the ground up for those things!

Piracy is a great example of a topic where legality and morality aren’t the same.

Those kinds of topics are incredibly valuable teaching moments for children.

I would teach them when they are mature enough. Help them understand why some people think it is wrong, when/why you think it is acceptable, and how to do it safely.

You can teach them the difference between actual theft and copying. Explain how piracy has benefited humanity as a whole, explain why knowledge and cultural experiences shouldn’t be gate kept by mega-corps from underprivileged people.

There are so many valuable lessons that you as parents could pass on to your kids through the topic of piracy.

And as every major platform enshitifies and information of all kinds gets locked behind more paywalls, piracy will become a more and more important skill to have.

Could you link/provide a list of coop dev groups? I’d love to help support them.

Agreed.

Nintendo brass = scumbags. Trash corpo who hates its customers except for milking their money.

It is morally good to pirate all Nintendo products, crack all their hardware, and disparage all their advertising.

For me what has worked best is setting a bare minimum that is super easy to hit. Creates opportunities for easy wins, which then often gives me just enough of that dopamine boost to do another little thing.

For instance, I try to work out 3 days a week. Some days even walking up my stairs takes almost all my willpower. So what I do is just tell myself, “it’s alright, to skip the full workout, just go over to your dumbell and do 1 single rep, that’s it.”

I almost always can at least do the absolute bare minimum, like lift the weight 1 time. Or pick up just one item of clothing off the floor, or put 1 dirty dish in the dishwasher.

Allowing myself to do just the absolute minimum without shaming myself really helped my mental health. I very often found that the task wasn’t as terrible as it seemed in my head, and the amount of energy I had was a little bit more than I thought I did.

The dopamine from actually being able to do a few things fed into itself and created those healthy brain paths and habits over time. I’m in a far better place mentally now, and my baseline has increases a lot.

Thanks!

Isn’t that roughly the overall vision of the Free Software movement? We can all build software that’s open and free, as long as that is pushed forward in perpetuity to all subsequent versions/forks.

Your compensation for providing code for free, is that you also get access to all other code for free too. I have paid for lots of FOSS software over the years, or at least donated to their projects and creators/maintainers.

I’ve actually paid for more FOSS software and services than proprietary software and services overall. Because I want to support the kind of ecosystem I believe should exist.

I favor a pay-what-you-can model personally. Some take for free, some pay a pittance, some pay at cost, and a few pay well over asking price. It’s actually the same model that modern free-to-play games use. Most players spend little to no money on the game, just playing for free and keeping everything stock.

But a small amount of players are dolphins and whales, people who happily spend hundreds, in some cases, thousands of dollars on in-game features, items, skins, etc.

That gives me some hope that the model can work, we just need a culture of end users that believe in that sort of thing. That’s the kind of pirate ethos I advocate for. Pay for stuff that deserves your money. Pay for things that respect you as a user, respect your privacy, right to repair, right to copy and remix, right to self-host and mod, etc. Those are the kinds of products and services that get my money.

Giant media conglomerates and super-rich entertainers with private yachts and jets, they don’t get a cent of my money. I pirate their stuff with the wind at my back, sun on my skin, and a smile on my face.

This is one of the few actually interesting counterpoints to piracy. The rights of the artist for the use of their work is a very nuanced topic. For instance, most people would say that parody and satire are very important forms of expression that ought to be protected. But those often dance the line of “infringement” in the eyes of the courts.

On the other hand, it feels wrong to say that an artist has to accept their work being used for evil purposes, like a group of neo-nazis using an open source font in their propaganda materials, or a group of religious extremists using a musician’s backing track in their efforts to convert people.

I lean pretty strongly for the rights of the consumers of art to do with it what they want, but I admit it gives me pause on some of the edge cases. Very complicated issue.

To each their own I guess.

So if you think the book example is fine even reading the whole thing and never paying for it, how is that any different from any other piracy examples? You consumed media that the artist created in its entirety without giving them any compensation.

I agree that physical goods are totally different, but in my magical wizard example, I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.

A real life example is if I take a digital scan of a 3D figurine, turn it into a 3D model, and let other people on the web download it and 3D print it.

Did I “steal” anything? Of course not. Nobody is being deprived of anything at all.

Not a wall of text, I spent quite a bit of time carefully breaking down all of my points by numbered section.

If it’s too much work for you to go through my post and address each point like I have been doing for yours, then I don’t think we have much else to discuss.

One last question: Is it wrong for you to go to a bookstore, read a book, and put it back on the shelf without buying it? What about reading just 75% of it? 50%? How about just the first chapter to see if you like it? Or do you think it would be wrong to even skim the first page without buying it?

Go confess to a priest for being a naughty little pirate lol.

Yeahhh, obvious you don’t have anything left to say.

1. You disputed the OP’s post where they stated that piracy wasn’t stealing by claiming that people like them “needed to hide behind word definitions”

2. Corpos are bad, Capitalism is bad…yes, I stand by those statements because they are true.

3. Yes, it would be better for society at large if everybody pirated from the corpos and stopped funding their monopolistic, anti-consumer, anti-repair, privacy-violating practices. Again, yes this is true, I stand by that, that’s the definition of “greater good.”

4. Never hand waved the moral implications away of innocent people getting hurt by piracy. What I actually did was contrast the moral bad of that harm, against the moral good of harming the corpos that abuse society at large. I determined that the overall moral good of harming the corpos outweighed the moral bad of harming innocents. I also pointed out the fact that the real harm has been perpetrated by the Capitalists, billionaires, and big media conglomerates, not the pirates.

5. You obviously lack the ability or at least the willingness to address my counterexample about what your philosophy entails. The fact that you thought that was an analogy instead of what it actually was, (a reductio ad absurdum) demonstrates that.

6. I don’t need to try, you clearly haven’t thought very hard or deep about your position, it’s shallow and filled with knee-jerk argumentation.

I suspect strongly that you feel very guilty about your actions, and instead of addressing those feelings, you project them onto others.

I think you do this because you cannot stand the idea that other people pirate things guilt-free, you are jealous of them, so you project your own feelings of shame onto those other people and claim (without any compelling reasons), that those people aren’t actually guilt-free, they are just lying to themselves to deal with the shame.

You rage and seethe at those with a clear sense of purpose and vision because you lack those things in your own endeavors, and it galls you.